Saturday 7 January
Last time we were in Philadelphia's small but homey Chinatown, we had a great meal at Shiao Lan Kung. But it's a pretty popular, crowded place, and this time we formed a small crowd ourselves: we two and our friends Lisa, Sandra, Michele (who doesn't eat red meat), and Michael. So we headed to a seafood place we'd seen highly rated on the internet: Tai Lake.
A lucky choice: on arrival, we were immediately escorted to the one vacant round table and served tea, plus some Tsingtao beer, which led to a discussion with Michael (who is German) about the Reinheitsgebot purity law (as we say in the Department of Redundancy Department).
There were several parties of Chinese people enjoying the pre-new-year specialties; unusually, Tai Lake supplies an extra seasonal menu that translates these specialties, so we had a nice time passing it around and commenting on the jelly fish and crispy pork intestine, snake and mushroom soup, duck tongues, and braised sea cucumber.
We played it rather safer, however.
We shared appetizers of crispy seafood rolls (nice and creamy inside) and pearl-like steamed shrimp dumplings. Then we went on to a dish of snowpea leaves with savory dry scallop sauce - here Michael (who is a botanist) asked about the species of plant it was, and Barbara was just able to come up with pisum sativum. Other main dishes were crisp and peppery salt-baked softshell crab; littleneck clams with minced pork and basil, with a whiff of star anise; and a whole steamed chicken, a bit bland at first, needing the chopped ginger that came with it, but more savory flavors came out as it cooled.
We ended with fortune cookies and oranges. An auspicious feast for the upcoming Year of the (Yang Water) Dragon.
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